Live: 73 ill after eating prasad

73 people fell ill, 17 of them critically, after consuming 'prasad' at a religious function at Garbeta area of West Midnapore district today.

District authorities said the programme had taken place during the day at Lapuria village.

The critically ill were rushed to Midnapore Medical College Hospital, the sources said adding the rest were being treated at Garbeta block primary heath centre.

A medical team was rushed from here to Garbeta.9.00 pm:

Power cuts kill 10 babies in Pakistan hospital

At least 10 new-born babies died due to interruptions in oxygen supply caused by power breakdown in a children's hospital in Pakistan's Sindh province over the last 24 hours, police and hospital sources said Saturday.

According to police, four children who were in the intensive care unit died late Friday night when power broke down at the government hospital in Larkana city, Xinhua reported.

The hospital administration tried to start the power generators but they were out of order. The electricity could not resume till Saturday afternoon and the babies continued dying one after the other due to the absence of backup for oxygen tanks.

Talking to the media, Afsar Bhutt, medical superintendent of the hospital, said that the infants did not die due to administrative fault or negligence on the part of doctors but due to late arrival for medical treatment at hospital.

Both the governor and the chief minister of Sindh have ordered a probe into the incident.

Ship with 52 on board sinks in Indonesia

A wooden ship with 52 people on board sank in the waters off central Sulawesi in the eastern part of Indonesia, on official said Saturday.

The incident took place Friday evening, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman of the national disaster management and mitigation agency, told Xinhua by phone Saturday.

8.20 pm:

Flash mob hits Kolkata street

The flash mob hit Kolkata Saturday with around 100 youth and teenagers dancing to peppy English and Hindi songs in the city's shopping hub.

The dancers, some of them professionals and others amateurs, jived to singer Jennifer Lopez's "Dance again" and "Tum hi ho bandhu" from the film "Cocktail", gathering a big crowd at the busy Esplanade.

A flash mob is a group of people who gather at a public location to perform a brief dance, and disperse rapidly after the event.

However, the aim of the Kolkata dancers - belonging to Freaking Twisters group and street play group Lok - was to promote adult literacy.

8.10 pm:

Visa on arrival for Buddhist tourists: Sahai

Tourists from countries having a sizeable Buddhist population such as Thailand and Malaysia would be provided visas on arrival, Union Tourism Minister Subodh Kant Sahai said Saturday.

Sahai said: "India being the land of origin of Buddhism is the main attraction for Buddhist tourists from across the globe. The tourism ministry is drawing up plans to attract more tourists from Buddhist countries by providing them special facilities like VoA to citizens of Thailand and Malaysia,".

As a facilitative measure to attract more foreign tourists to India, the union government had launched the VoA scheme in January 2010 for citizens of Finland, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Singapore visiting India as tourists.

This scheme was extended for the citizens of six more countries - Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Laos and Myanmar - in January 2011.7.40 pm:

Failed Robbery attempt at Delhi bank

A group of people broke into a State Bank of India branch in the national capital in the early hours of Saturday but fled after failing to unlock the ATM placed inside, police said.

CCTV footage from the bank in Inderlok showed three to four people inside the branch around 1 a.m.

Police said they had entered the bank after cutting open the iron grill of a ventilator.

After they were unable to unlock the ATM, they tried to break it open and also damaged four of the five CCTV cameras.

Police said no valuable was stolen from the branch which had closed down around 7 p.m. Friday.

The incident comes a day after robbers fled with Rs 5.5 crore of ICICI Bank from a cash van in Defence Colony, after shooting at a guard. 7.15 pm:

Who will win 'Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa 5'?

Rashmi Desai Sandhu, Gurmeet Chowdhary or Rithvik Dhanjani? The competition in dance reality show "Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa 5" is at its peak with the top three finalists sweating it out to win the trophy at the grand finale Sunday night.

The three-month dance journey is set to culminate in a star-studded grand finale, which promises to entertain viewers with some high voltage performances as well as coming together of two big screen divas Madhuri Dixit and Sridevi on the same stage.

The Sunday episode will also see judges Remo D'Souza, Karan Johar and Madhuri, entertaining audiences with their performances.

A teenaged Pakistani boy, who ran away from home to pursue his "dream" of meeting Bollywood hero Ajay Devgan and crossed the India-Pakistan border, landed in a juvenile home instead, thereby ending his wishful efforts, it has been revealed.

Makkal Osai reported that Khasif Ali from Delapur village in Okara district fled his home about a year ago.

He was detained by the Border Security Force at Kasur border for straying into India in September last year and sent to the Faridkot juvenile home in Punjab, Star Online reported.

For the past one year, the Faridkot administration tried in vain to contact his relatives in Pakistan.

Lady luck finally smiled on the 13-year-old boy last Friday when Pakistan's Ajoka Theatre group arrived in Faridkot for a performance.

The theatre director, Pakistani actress Madiha Gohar, was asked to help trace the boy's family. She managed to contact the family and through the Pakistan High Commission in India, the boy was brought back from India and reunited with his family.

According to a brother-in-law of Khasif, the boy used to skip classes to watch Bollywood movies as he was crazy about Devgan and wanted to go to Bollywood to meet him.

6.20 pm:

Fire in ONGC plant in Assam, ULFA claims responsibility

A fire broke out at a pump in the ONGC plant in Assam's Jorhat district due to an accidental blast, officials said Saturday. However, there was no report of any causality in the blast, for which the ULFA militants have claimed responsibility.

A spokesman said the fire at GGS (Gas Gathering Station) in the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) plant at Barkhola in Jorhat took place around 9.30 p.m. Friday.

He said that the fire occurred due to an accidental blast in the plant due to some technical snag. The production process has not been hampered due to the incident.

However, the anti-talk faction of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) militants claimed responsibility for the blast and said that the attack was part of the outfit's campaign to strike at vital installations, protesting against the exploitation of the Central government.

Police officials, however, said that the blast was triggered due to some technical snag and that it was not triggered by the anti-talk militants of the ULFA.5.50 pm:

Justice Altmas Kabir is new Chief Justice of India

Justice Altmas Kabir, the seniormost judge of the Supreme Court, was Saturday sworn in as the 39th Chief Justice of India.

Justice Kabir has succeeds S.H. Kapadia, who demitted office Saturday. He will be the Chief Justice of India for nine months, till July 19, 2013.

Born on July 19, 1948, Chief Justice Kabir is only the second Chief Justice, along with his predecessor, to be born in post-independence India.

After doing his MA and LLB, Chief Justice Kabir enrolled as an advocate in 1973 and practised in the district court and the Calcutta High Court.Read More

5.12 pm:

No more fasts, only agitations, says Hazare

Anna Hazare has said that he will not resort to fasting any more to press for his demands, and will fight for his causes through agitations.

"Now onwards I will not undertake fast. In future I will fight for my causes through agitations," Hazare said on Friday night at a Ganesh mandal ceremony in Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial township near Pune.

The anti-corruption crusader also said he would continue to work to send "clean" people to Parliament.

Average daytime air temperatures have reached a peak of 6 degrees Celsius at 2 pm local time. A Martian day -- known as a sol -- is slightly longer than Earth’s at 24 hours 39 minutes.

Temperatures have risen above freezing during the day for more than half of the Martian sols since REMS started recording data.

Because Mars’s atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s and its surface much drier, the effects of solar heating are much more pronounced. At night the air temperatures sink drastically, reaching a minimum of -70 degrees just before dawn.

1512 hrs

Mamata to hit Delhi streets on Oct 1

Continuing her protest against the Centre’s push for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multibrand retail, West Bengal Chief Minister and erstwhile UPA member Mamata Banerjee is planning a huge rally in New Delhi on October 1.

Banerjee has been steadfast in her opposition to the foreign supermarket chains, saying they would hurt millions of small shopkeepers.

Earlier this month, Banerjee pulled out of the ruling coalition over the ‘anti-people’ economic reforms initiated by the Congress led government at the Centre, that included a rise in the prices of diesel, FDI in multi-brand retail, aviation and media, and putting a cap on number of subsidized LPG cylinders to be issued to BPL families.

1452 hrs

Police hand over black box in Nepal plane crash

Police on Saturday handed over the black box data recorder of a plane that crashed on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital killing all 19 people on board to authorities probing the accident.

The twin-propeller Sita Air plane had just taken off on Friday from Kathmandu and was headed to the town of Lukla, gateway to Mount Everest, when it plunged into the banks of a river near the city's airport around daybreak.

Among the dead were seven Britons, five Chinese and seven local passengers and crew.

"We have taken out the data recorder and handed it over to the civil aviation authorities. The rescue work at the site has ended," national police spokesman Binod Singh said.

1330 hrs

Manmohan: FDI has nothing to do with U.S.

Unfazed by the uproar over FDI in retail and other tough decisions, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday indicated that the government may continue with the reforms process and expressed willingness to discuss issues with allies.

“We will do what is good for the country... reforms are not one-off process,” he said.

The Prime Minister was responding to questions on demands for rollback of decisions on FDI in multi-brand retail, diesel price hike and cap on subsidised LPG cylinders by the opposition.

1237 hrs

China shuts 97,000 blogs, online porn accounts

As part of its anti-pornography drive, Chinese authorities have shut down about 97,000 blog and microblog accounts for spreading pornography and lewd content.

According to State Internet Information Office, authorities closed the accounts over the past seven months, Xinhua reported.

A total of 287 Internet companies were probed and punished during the campaign, it said.

The office also said public security authorities have cracked 2,446 cases of pornography, and 41 rings involved in pornography via the Internet were busted.

1152 hrs

Footage of man committing suicide aired live on TV

American broadcast network, Fox News, aired the final moments of a car chase in Arizona, which showed a man shoot himself in the head, as hundreds of Americans watched it live on the television channel.

As producers and viewers watched the live footage of the pursuit, the suspect leapt out of his car and began running down a dirt track, following which he produced a gun.

Shephard Smith, Fox News's noon anchor, was providing a running commentary as the suspect lurched away from the vehicle and viewers could hear his producers gasping in horror as the man shot himself, the Telegraph reports.

1130 hrs

James Bond's swimming trunks up for auction

The blue swimming trunks, which Daniel Craig wore during a scene in ‘Casino Royale,’ is set to fetch hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity in an online auction.

The shorts are just one of 50 items of James Bond memorabilia to be sold in Christie’s charity sale to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first 007 movie ‘Dr No,’ the Daily Mail reported.

Other lots include a one-third scale model of an Aston Martin DB5 used in the filming of ‘Skyfall,’ the next Bond adventure set to hit the big screen in October.

The car was used in earlier Bond films and has become closely associated with the fictional double agent.

The model is expected to fetch 30,000 pounds to 40,000 pounds, while another Aston Martin built in 2008 and used in the opening sequence of the last Bond movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ has a price tag of 100,000 pounds to 150,000 pounds.

1057 hrs

Vatican opens doors to butler leaks trial

The Vatican is opening its doors on the most embarrassing scandal of Pope Benedict XVI's papacy, putting the pope's butler on trial for allegedly stealing and leaking papal correspondence to a journalist in a bid to shed light on what he called the "evil and corruption" in the church.

Paolo Gabriele, a 46-year-old father of three, faces up to four years in prison if he is convicted of aggravated theft in the worst security breach in the Vatican's recent history. He has already confessed and asked to be pardoned by the pope — something Vatican watchers say is a given if he is convicted.

1000 hrs

Another girl gangraped in Haryana, three arrested

Yet another teenaged girl was allegedly raped by four men in a godown in the main market of Gohana, 33km from Rohtak, in Haryana's Sonepat district on Friday. Police have three accused.

The police have registered a case against the four - so far identified as Kali, Harish, Santy and Deepak all resident of Gohana - on the complaint of the victim's uncle.

Mobile carriers in India have not managed to generate expected returns on investment in 3G services because a large chunk of mobile phone users still prefer the cheaper 2G services. A penalty on any of the operators would, thus, add to the pressure on revenues.

0830 hrs

India’s heaviest satellite GSAT-10 launched

India's advanced communication satellite GSAT-10 was successfully launched early Saturday on board Ariane-5 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana.

At 3,400 kg at lift-off, GSAT-10 is the heaviest built by Bangalore-headquartered Indian Space Research Organisation.

GSAT-10, with a design life of 15 years is expected to be operational by November and will augment telecommunication, Direct-To-Home and radio navigation services.

0213 hrs

T20 champions England take on New Zealand today afternoon

Today afternoon will see defending World T20 champions England take on New Zealand with both fighting to enter the next stage of the competition having lost their previous Super 8 stage games against West Indies and Sri Lanka respectively.

Saturday will also see the Aarushi Talwar trial judge take a call on an important piece of evidence. Read more on that here.

September 29 is incidentally the day when the famous Indo-Canadian standup comedian Russell Peters was born.